by Choshu on Western merchant vessels. The young aristocrats of Satsuma and Choshu saw how helpless their fiefs were against Western naval strength. They learned their lesson at once, and demonstrating an amazing ability to reorient their thinking, they dropped all thought of a narrow policy of isolation and immediately began to study the techniques of warfare that had made the West so strong.
Satsuma soon launched its own small navy along modern lines, and the young officers who began their naval careers in Satsuma were to become the men who created and dominated the Imperial Japanese Navy until well into the twentieth century. Similarly, Choshu, abandoning the concept of a small warrior class, started to create from its peasantry a modern army trained in the techniques of European military science. The success of this attempt was clearly demonstrated in 1866, when Edo dispatched forces to chastise Choshu for its anti-Tokugawa intrigues. The aristocratic warriors of Edo were fought to a standstill by the peasant recruits of Choshu, led by a group of young samurai officers who were to become the dominant element in the officer corps of the Imperial Japanese Army. The samurai of Satsuma and Choshu, far from remaining champions of anti-foreign conservatism, had ushered in the military and social revolution that would sweep away the last vestiges of the feudal order in Japan.
Finding themselves in virtual control of the new imperial government in the late autumn of 1867, the young samurai of western Japan embarked on a daring course of rapid modernization, which amounted to a